With the first BCS rankings coming out this week, I feel obligated to share some thoughts about this flawed system. Flat out, the BCS system sucks. Colleges refuse to get rid of it and the bowl system because of the tens of millions of dollars these colleges make off of their "student" athletes. These same college presidents that are in favor of the BCS are the same ones that say a playoff wouldn't work because it would interfere too much with the student part of student- athlete. However, we all know these to be lies. I guess 1-AA, Div. 2, and Div. 3 football players don't have to go to class, because a playoff system works quite well for them. If the NCAA and these schools were so worried about the student, they wouldn't allow Monday, Tues, Weds, Thurs night games. But they do. Why? One word:MONEY. Is anyone really surprised? I doubt it. These colleges make more money off these athletes than any other thing they do. I understand that these colleges need to make money of their sports teams, particularly off of football, in order to support their school's other sports. I understand this, so I have a solution to make everyone happy. Have a 16 team playoff. Those 16 teams will be the winners from the 6 major conferences as the automatic qualifiers and then the next best 10 teams taken from the AP poll. These 16 teams would form the playoff for the National Championship. The teams that don't make it into the playoff still will have a postseason as well. The lower tier bowls will take their pick from the teams not in the playoff and still have their bowl games and still make money for both the school and the bowl sponsors. What about the top tier bowls such as the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, etc. Well we would have them. In a 16 team playoff, that is 15 games. So take the top 15 bowl games, which would be all the ones after Jan1 and a few before Jan1. Think that won't make the bidding go sky high for these games? Imagine the bidding war companies such as FedEx, Tostitos, All-State, Citi, etc. would have to get these bowls. The semifinal games and the national championship and one of the quarterfinal games would be the original 4 BCS bowls (Sugar, Rose, Fiesta, Orange, there is no need for the BCS championship game) with each of the four rotating so every four years, each bowl will have had the National Title game. And back to the whole student athlete issue, there isn't an issue with March Madness when classes are is session. The majority of these schools competing year in and year out for the college football title game are on Winter Break anyways during the bowl season. A four week playoff would be from Dec7-Jan7 and not a single kid would miss class.Problem solved.
1 comment:
I agree entirely. It's been said that the BCS will be done away with a few years and when that day comes, there shouldn't be a question about a 16 team play off. Will it drag through the players and the coaches holiday season, yes, but that should not be a problem. Also, it is not like the players cannot handle additonal games in the academic sense. Granted, there will not be as many corporate sponsors available as done with the BCS, but that does not mean the playoffs cannot be huge. Fans will most certainly go and for those that are money hungry, there are still plenty of opportunities for money to be made.
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